Indeed, the appeal to metaphor in religion is at least ambiguous. Maybe the metaphors free us up to having religious experiences that bypass naïve literalism, or maybe the turn to metaphors frees up religious fraudsters to get away with saying anything.

The thing is that religious myths are indeed stories, which means they're subject to aesthetic interpretations. But not all artworks are equal, so there's an aesthetic form of atheistic humanism that calls for less obsolete metaphors and stories.